The Volcano of the Middle East:

The Agonising Transformation of the

Palestinian Peasants into Proletarians
The creation and evolution of the Israeli state are depicted by the bourgeoisie as one of
those idyllic epics for which it has a strong predilection. Haven't the insufficiently praised
virtues of this tiny people, its toil, its courage and perseverance, made the deserts bloom?
In reality this fairy tale, spread with an aura of self-righteousness, conceals the drama of
the expropriation of the rural populace. To be sure, all the zones of this planet which have
been opened one after another to the penetration of capital have witnessed this drama. But
in Palestine it attained a degree of cynicism and barbarity heretofore unequalled.
Everywhere the capitalists attempted to deny the fact of this expropriation outright in
order to preserve the philanthropic(!) purity of their deeds. In Palestine they even went so
far as to deny the existence of the expropriated population, a land without people for a people
without a land! Isn't it easier this way? In actual history, wrote Marx, it is notorious that
conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. For the bourgeoisie,
Right and labour were from all time the sole means of enrichment, the present year of course
always excepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but
idyllic. [1]
The paradise in the Negev desert, the flourishing cultivation of citrus fruits and avocados
on the coastal plain as well as the industrial boom (even on the scale of a very small
country) presuppose the complete despoliation of the Palestinian peasants. The history of
their expropriation is similar to that of the English peasants, which Marx said, is written in
the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. [2]

From the Ottoman Code to the Great Revolt of 1933 1936

The calvary of primitive accumulation or rather its Palestinian re-enactment, which is only
the most striking act of a drama which has affected the entire region, dates back to the
middle of the last century. It began in the year 1858 when the Ottoman Empire, to which
Palestine and the other countries of the Near East belonged, promulgated its law on
landed property. The only way this archaic and antiquated empire could compete with the
modern powers of Europe, albeit briefly, was by accentuating its pressure on the peasant
masses. The object of this law was to replace traditional collective or tribal ownership with
individual land ownership. Rather than being paid collectively, taxes were henceforth to
be levied on individuals. In the case of defaulted payment the individual would be held
responsible, thereby weakening any resistance to the increased tax burden imposed by the
state.

The peasants who shared the fruits and the use of the land according to the rules of village
or tribal organisation, reacted in various ways to the new law. Some simply refused to
conform to the law and never had their lands registered. At the time of the creation of the
Israeli state in 1948, they were expelled from their lands on the pretext that they had no
proof of ownership. Others included in their declaration to the state only that third which
was cultivated annually, omitting the two-thirds that lay fallow. Still others registered an
area less than the cultivated part, knowing well that the Ottoman state was not able to
exercise effective control over everyone. Finally numerous villages registered their whole
territory in the name of the village chiefs since they paid less tax or were exempt from
taxation. The latter took advantage of the customs of the empire, whose immense size
compelled the central power to buy off the village chiefs in order to dissuade them from
assuming the leadership of peasant revolts.
Consequently the enforcement of the Ottoman Code led to a strengthening of the role of
the village chiefs. Originally they became landowners to render a service to the
peasants, but the day would surely come when their heirs would try to profit from this
distinction that nobody had wanted. For its part, the state decided to apply that rule of the
code by virtue of which lands without owners (in fact the fallow lands or any that had not
been declared) should be considered property of the empire (called miri) and on the
strength of this legal title began to sell land from vast estates to Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian
and Iranian merchants. These attempted to take over effective possession of the lands,
with varied success depending on the degree of resistance by the peasants. Those who
were not successful retained their titles to the land which they sold to Zionist
organisations a few years later at quite handsome prices.
This process resulted in a growing concentration of landed property although the
economic structures had not yet undergone any profound transformation, the peasants
generally retaining actual possession of the land even if they had now no more than
partial legal ownership. Such was the general situation on the eve of World War I. By the
time it was over the Ottoman Empire had to give way to Great Britain. England's interest
in Palestine was twofold: to control the strategic region around the Suez Canal and to
prevent the emergence of a large anti-imperialist national movement by creating a puppetstate to divide the zone where sentiment for national unity was awakening. British
imperialism's policy converged with the interests of Zionist capital to culminate in a
common plan for the creation of that state, as both a local policeman and a colonial
enterprise.
Zionist capital had already attempted to set up colonies in Palestine before the collapse of
the Ottoman Empire. Yet it was only able to implement its plan on a large scale under the
British mandate, in particular with assistance from the Rothschild Foundation [3], this
time thoroughly transforming the relations of production. The purchase of land by the
Jewish Colonisation Association, which was founded for that purpose, could naturally
mean nothing other than the eviction of the Palestinian sharecroppers and farmers. In
reality even though the deeds to this land were held by the large absentee landlords who
willingly sold most of it in the first few years after the war (see Table I), the land which
carried these deeds remained the indispensable source of the Palestinian peasants'
livelihood.

Table 1: Origin of Jewish Property Rights According to the Type of Seller (1920 - 1938)
Date of
purchase

% of land bought from

absentee landlords

% of lands ceded by large

resident landlords

% of lands ceded
by fellahin

1920-1922

75.4

20.8

3.8

1923-1927

86

12.4

1.6

1928-1932

45.5

36.2

18.3

1933-1936

14.9

62.7

22.5

Source: A. Granoti, The Land System in Palestine. London, 1962.

The dispossessed fellah had to become an agricultural labourer on his own land. The fierce
exploitation of local manpower by Zionist capital at the beginning of the century was
further exacerbated by the principle of Jewish Labour designed to preserve the colonial
settlement project. This principle entitled the immigrants to expel the fellahin from their
jobs while the Zionist fund financed the difference in wages in order to facilitate the
employment of European labour power. This situation could not continue, long without
violent confrontations because the expelled peasants were left only with the certainty of a
slow death while they watched the colonists occupy their land. For this reason there have
been nearly permanent social revolts from 1921, 1925, 1929, 1933, 1936 to the present.
In 1921, three years after the British arrival, the situation had become so acute that a
serious uprising spread throughout the country. The areas most affected were Safad in the
north, and Hebron and Jerusalem in the centre. The peasants' wrath was directed
essentially against the Zionists, whose settlements were hard hit. The English army
assumed the task of restoring law and order; it has always shown enthusiasm for this kind
of mission. With honourable intent to be sure, it suppressed the irresponsible minority by
means of summary executions, hangings, etc. The uprisings reached their climax in the
1936 revolts, which lasted three years and were accompanied by a magnificent six month
general strike in the towns. The motive force of this uprising was no longer the peasantry
or the bourgeoisie, but for the first time an agricultural proletariat deprived of means of
labour and subsistence, along with an embryo of a working class concentrated essentially
in the ports and in the oil refinery at Hafa. It should be noted that this movement was
initiated in the towns and subsequently spread to the countryside where a guerrilla force
took shape, attacking Palestinian landowners as well as the English and Zionist colonists.
In fact numerous landlords were attacked by the Palestinian revolutionaries because they
had sold their land to the Zionists. For the dispossessed peasants it was clear that the land
speculators were getting rich on their impoverishment.
Because of the Stalinist counterrevolution and the absence of a revolutionary proletarian
movement in Europe capable of giving assistance, the Palestinian revolt was left to face the
war machine of British imperialism alone. Nonetheless the British were compelled to
supplement the terror of their weaponry with promises of independence and other similar
manoeuvres in order to put an end to the revolt. Even the Arab feudal chiefs and the petty
kings of the region in their pay had to be called on to help. These made a fraternal appeal
to the Palestinians to silence their guns and to trust the good intentions of His Majesty's
government. And in order to help them understand this appeal better, the borders of the
Transjordan (where Prince Abdallah, the grandfather of the present-day butcher of

Amman reigned; he was murdered by a Palestinian in 1952) were closed to any insurgents
who tried to take refuge or procure arms and provisions there, as well as to any volunteers
who tried to join the revolt from the Transjordan.
The laws on collective responsibility in the Arab villages and districts, those terrorist
delicacies which semi-barbarian Oriental despotism bequeathed to the civilisation of
western capitalism, date from this period. Under these laws the village inhabitants are
forced to provide accommodation for police detachments on punitive missions and the
whole population is held responsible for operations carried out by anyone in the region.
Thus the population is subject to martial law and enjoys the right to see houses where
rebels have taken refuge destroyed and to undergo imprisonment as a deterrent. Thus,
following an operation that cut telephone lines in Galilee, three villages were occupied by
the British army. All the men were lined up. As they were counted, those who had the
misfortune of being number 10, 20, 30, etc. were shot in front of the whole village.
With these methods, Christian and democratic England intended to put down the revolt of
the land less, bread less and jobless peasants. A population which did not exceed 800,000
was placed under the control of 30,000 soldiers! All the strike leaders were imprisoned.
The feudal and religious leaders who assumed the leadership of the movement gave the
colonists decisive help: in liaison with Prince Abdallah of such sinister memory they
continued to stab the struggle in the back, participating with the English in the quest for a
solution to the situation. The British launched a major offensive during which the
insurgent villages were bombarded (an example followed by the Israelis today) leaving a
total of 5,000 Palestinians dead and 2,500 imprisoned. [4]
The heroic spirit of the Palestinian workers and peasants in those years was broken. The
terrible isolation to which the international situation condemned their revolt prevented
any broadening of its horizon that would have enabled it to converge with the struggle of
all the exploited masses of the region against the colonial yoke and the old order. It was
also paralysed by the weight of the social backwardness in which the country vegetated
and which translated into the half-feudal half-religious leadership of the movement.
The working class was unable to play a more important role because the party that
claimed to represent it, the Palestinian Communist Party, was guided by a completely false
orientation, which was further aggravated by an International that had nothing
communist about it except the name. Far from being able to make its opposition to the
reactionary religious leadership clear, the PCP, whose militants included a majority of antiZionist Jewish workers as well as a minority of Arab workers, was compelled by the
Stalinized International to support the mufti of Palestine, Hadj Amin Husseini, a sort of
Khomeini before the fact, if not worse. This disoriented the proletariat completely and
fostered the development of nationalist tendencies on both sides. The Arab workers,
finding that their party supported the most reactionary wing of the movement, left it to
join less moderate nationalist organisations. For their part, the Jewish workers could not
support such a position without finding themselves totally disarmed in the face of the
deceitful anti-feudal propaganda of Zionism. Here as elsewhere, the Stalinist
counterrevolution completely destroyed the class party, with greater ease in Palestine
insofar as the proletariat there was still embryonic and above all terribly divided as a
consequence of the colonial situation.

The revolt of 1933-1936, courageous as it was, ended in a complete fiasco. In spite of the
momentary retreat by Great Britain which was obliged to limit Jewish immigration for a
few years, the Zionist movement became stronger and stronger. The Palestinian movement
itself foundered in such bitterness and deception that it can be said without hesitation that
the painful outcome of the war in 1948 had already been partly determined in 1936.

The Birth of Israel and the War of Expropriation

At the end of the Second World War the old English empire began to give way to the
American imperialist colossus. The Zionist movement was all the better for it since the
English presence had become uncomfortable and even intolerable, inducing several
Zionist groups in a hurry to establish their own state to initiate an anti-English terrorist
movement, in which Begin earned his spurs. By this time Great Britain wished only to
relinquish its responsibility for Palestine, and it tossed the hot potato to the U.N., that new
den of thieyes built on the ashes of the defunct League of Nations.
The preparations for the formation of a Jewish state led to the Israeli Arab war of 1947. On
May 14, 1948, while the delegates of the virtuous bourgeois nations lounged in the
sumptuous rooms of the U.N. babbling on about whether an Arab and a Jew were capable
of living together without going for each others' throats (with these Orientals, my dear,
one never knows...) or whether it might be better to separate them with barbed wire, the
state of Israel was created. This resulted in a race between Truman and Stalin to see which
would recognise the new state first, and in particular, it opened the hunting season on
Palestinians.
Up to this time history had only given a foretaste of capitalist barbarity. Now the avowed
objective was to rid the country of as many ruined peasants as possible. This would be the
re-enactment on a grand scale of the calvary of the Scottish peasants documented by Marx:
the clearance and dispersion of the people is pursued by the proprietors [in this case the Zionists] as
a settled principle, as an agricultural necessity, just as trees and brushwood are cleared from the
wastes of America or Australia; and the operation goes on in a quiet, businesslike way, etc. [5]
For international and local reasons Israel was not able to occupy all of Palestine just then.
In fact, the process of expropriation was less advanced in some areas than others. The
mountainous central region was less interesting to the Zionists, and furthermore the state
of Israel was allowed to establish itself only on part of Palestine within a framework of a
partition advocated by the U.N. However the portion actually occupied was larger than
the partition plan provided for, even though the West Bank and Gaza Strip escaped the
Zionist conquest for the moment, the former falling to Prince Abdallah (who on this
occasion was made king of Jordan by the English), the latter going to Egypt. Almost a
million Palestinian workers and peasants were driven out of their homes. This time the
bourgeoisie made a complete mockery of sacrosanct property rights, legality and other
lies. Brute force, terror, massacre and extermination were raised to supreme law, in order
to serve as a foundation for all subsequent legislation.
It is hardly necessary to describe the miserable conditions under which the Palestinian
masses were herded together. Their situation was no less enviable than that of the
hundreds of thousands of Jews who had just emerged from concentration camps to be

shipped off to Palestine where imperialism dangled the vision of Eden rediscovered before
their eyes. But it is certain that these million Palestinians, uprooted and condemned to
unemployment, would disrupt the fragile regional equilibrium for all time and become the
epicentre of social revolt in the Middle East.
In spite of the determined attempts of the Israeli authorities to expel the greatest possible
number of Palestinians - and their efforts were successful for the most part - a minority
managed to stay put. In 1948 there were about 170,000 and today there are more than
500,000 Palestinians living within the state of Israel. This population has suffered
unspeakable oppression such as perhaps has only been equalled in the African colonial
societies. The Palestinian population has had to suffer under the dictatorial yoke of an
extraordinarily fierce military regime, whose only legal foundation is provided by the
famous British decrees from the time of the mandate, among which should be noted the
Emergency Defence Regulations, drawn up in 1945 to combat the movements of Jewish
resistance to the English occupation.
Here are two witnesses for the prosecution. For the first:
the question is as follows: will we be subject to official terror or will there be
individual freedom? No citizen is protected from life imprisonment without
trial (...) right to appeal has been abolished (...) the powers of the administration
to exile anyone at any time are unlimited (...). It is not necessary to commit any
offence; a decision made in some office is enough.
For the second:
the order established by this legislation is without precedent in civilised
countries. Even in Nazi Germany such laws did not exist.
These declarations were made at a meeting of lawyers held at Tel Aviv on February 7, 1946
in order to protest against repression... English colonial repression; the first by Bernard
(Dov) Joseph, later Israeli Minister of Justice, and the second by J. Shapira who became
Procurer-General of the Israeli republic. [6] A short two years later this nazi barbarity was
employed by the Zionists against the Palestinians.
But this barbaric legislation was not enough to satisfy the voracious colonialist appetite of
Israel, this monstrous offspring of the reactionary union between Zionism and western
capitalism. The terrorist arsenal of the Defence Regulations still had to be perfected, and
this was done through a series of laws which under cover of the state of war, legalised the
plundering of the Palestinians.
One of the masterpieces of this legislation was the law on absentee property. An absentee was
defined as
anyone who in the period between November 19, 1947 and May 19, 1948 was
owner of a plot of land situated in Israel and who during this period was either:
1) a citizen of Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq or Yemen; 2) in these
countries or anywhere in Palestine outside Israel; 3) a Palestinian citizen who
has left his place of residence in Palestine to take up residence in a region held
by forces which fought against the establishment of the state of Israel. [7]

This period coincides with the movement of large numbers of individuals who had fled
the zones of the most heated confrontations. How many peasants considered absentees
when they had only been displaced a few hundred meters, saw their lands confiscated?
Another virtue of this law was that it seized the lands of the clergy (more than 6 %). God
himself was an absentee!
Another legal monument is the famous emergency law, It allows certain regions to be
declared closed zones, and a written authorisation from the military government is
necessary to gain access to it. According to another clause, if a village is declared a security
zone the inhabitants no longer have the right to live there. More than a dozen villages in
Galilee have had to be abandoned for this reason. Such is the law! More laws of the same
kind have been enacted. While one such law authorises certain regions to be declared
temporary security zones, which means that the peasants are prevented from cultivating
their land, yet another law authorises the state to confiscate lands not cultivated for a
certain period of time. Nothing escapes the law!
The state completed this magnificent legal edifice with the Ordinances on the State of
Emergency of 1949, intended to supplement the English emergency laws of 1945. They give
full power to the military authority to meet public security need, to search homes and
automobiles, to issue arrest warrants, to conduct in camera summary trials without right of
appeal, to restrict individual freedom of movement, to impose house arrest and to deport
anyone. For example, article 119 authorises confiscation of land, while article 109
empowers the army to bar anyone from designated areas and to dictate restrictions
regarding personal contacts and employment. Here we have the explanation of one of the
secrets of democracy; it can afford the luxury of concealing the overt violence of class
oppression - compounded by racial and national oppression - with the hypocritical veil of
legality. [8]
These are the methods employed by Zionism to clear the land of its inhabitants on behalf
of capital. The expropriation of the Palestinian peasants is almost complete in the
territories seized in 1948. [9] The scarcity of land even extends to the towns and villages
where the population is cramped and land set aside for construction is extremely limited.
What became of the population, still essentially peasant in 1948, that remained within
Israel? This is shown in Table 2:
Table 2: Distribution of Arab Manpower among the Principal Sectors of Activity
1954

1966

1972

Agriculture

59.9%

39.1%

19.1%

Industry

8.2%

14.9%

12.5%

Construction and public works

8.4%

19.6%

26.6%

Other sectors

23.5%

26.4%

41.8%

Total

100%

100%

100%

Source: Annuaire statistique d'Isral. 1955 to 1973.

It is important to note that almost all Arabs employed in the industrial sector are wage
labourers. Of the active agricultural population 58 % are proletarians, which means that in
1972 less than 10 % of Arabs in Israel were bound to the land. The services employ a large

majority of wage labourers, to the point that in 1970, workers and assimilated represented
72.6 % of the active Arab population. [10] The new generation of Palestinians living in
Israel is thus essentially working class although it continues to live in a rural environment
(74 % of the population in 1967). The villages where they live are nothing other than
ghettos in which the state of Israel seeks to imprison them. These overexploited and
underpaid workers - in some cases they are paid half as much as a Jewish worker for the
same amount of work - are forced to make hour-long trips to and from work in packed
buses.
These proletarians have lived through a hell of poverty, wars, humiliation and massacres,
the memory of which has been etched in their minds. [11] The state of emergency was
lifted in 1966, but this could not mean the repeal of the laws that typified it. The
prerogatives of the military authority were simply transferred to the civil administration,
in particular to the police. In reality,
no matter what rights and liberties might be accorded by law or by custom to
the inhabitants of Israel, considerations of security can always call them into
question without any formal departure from legal procedure. [12]
Recently the few remaining peasants have again been victims of the arbitrary application
of terrorist legislation. Thus in 1976, under the banners of a land consolidation operation,
24,700 acres of land were snatched from the Arab population. This attack on the meagre
niche remaining to them led to mass demonstrations, strikes and confrontations with the
police and the army. The latter decreed a curfew and invaded numerous villages. Six
Arabs were killed and dozens injured. The episode was baptised day of the land. In
particular, this legislation is used today against any challenge to the state. And who has
the most to challenge if not the working class?
The working class, since 1967 in contact with the new wave of Palestinian workers living
under a regime of occupation on the Gaza Strip and on the West Bank, has awakened to
the struggle with a boldness that compensates for the length of time it has been containing
its anger. [13]

The New Wave of Expropriation During the 1967 War

Palestine is altogether a very small territory. With 27,000 square kilometres it is about the
size of Belgium. A third of it is desert, cultivation is very difficult and particularly costly. In
1948 Israel occupied nearly 21,000 square kilometres. Obviously such a diminutive
framework could not satisfy the voracious appetite of Zionist capital. In such a context,
expansion is a necessity, and expansionism the state religion.
Consequently in 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the scenario
of 1948 was repeated. In 1967 the Gaza Strip was inhabited by 450,000 Palestinians. Twothirds of these (376,775 in January 1967) were refugees who had come from the fertile
plains around Jaffa after their expulsion in 1948. More than 100,000 inhabitants of the Gaza
Strip, many of whom were forced to emigrate for the second time, had to take refuge in
neighbouring countries. The West Bank, which before the 1967 occupation was inhabited
by about 850,000 people, contained only 650,00 persons three years later; this means that

more than 200,000 Palestinians from the region had to abandon everything and to settle in
the concentration camps euphemistically called refugee camps. For one reason or another
more than 300,000 human beings were forced to give up their homes and thus lost their
right of return under Israeli legislation, designed solely to clear the land.
The infamous law on absentees has done its share-it has affected more than 80,000 acres.
Of the lands belonging to the state or to collectives, 16 % passed into the hands of those
occupying them. Israel also requisitioned more than 10,000 houses from the so-called
absentees who had been transformed into refugees in the camps. This is the usual
procedure. Other more refined plans have been imagined. In the town of Akraba on the
West Bank for example, the Zionists destroyed the crops by spraying them with chemicals.
It need not be added that the Israeli state deployed its whole well-known terrorist arsenal.
According to the declaration made personally by the defence minister at the time, Shimon
Prs, to the Knesset, several thousand Palestinians were expelled. Between 1967 and 1973,
23,000 Palestinians were incarcerated and between 1967 and 1971, as a result of the highly
Biblical principle of collective responsibility, 16,312 houses were destroyed. Several towns Latrun, Amwas, Yilo and Beit Nuba and many others - were simply wiped off the map.
In October 1967, colonisation was begun on the lands which had been confiscated through
state-organized gangsterism. In 1971 there were already 52 settlements on the recently
occupied territories. [14] Since then new settlements and new projects have continued
uninterrupted, and they periodically crop up in the news. [15]
It goes without saying that the Arab population in this area, even more than in Israel, is
denied any possibility of expression, of trade union or independent political association.
For thousands of Palestinians, suspicion of membership in a subversive organisation has
already earned them a total of several centuries in Zionist jails. Of a total population on the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip, estimated in 1970 at almost a million inhabitants (and
probably much more today in spite of the massive emigration to the petroleum producing
countries) apparently more than 100,000 Palestinians go to work in Israel every day. In
1973 one in every three workers and one in every two wage-labourers living in these zones
crossed the border daily. Considering the fact that the process of proletarianization has
continued in these zones while the local labour market has stagnated - if not shrunk - the
proportion is undoubtedly higher today.
These proletarians are subject to the most savage exploitation exacerbated by the
impossibility of living in Israel, by the work and travel limitations they are liable to, by the
lack of any rights in Israel and by the state of martial law in the occupied territories, Thus
the Palestinian worker on the West Bank and Gaza Strip who is already employed in the
worst paid sectors (in 1973, 52 % worked in construction and 19 % in agricultural) receives
a wage equal to half that earned by the Israeli worker, This does not take into account the
difference between the Jewish-Israeli and the Arab-Israeli, which is quite substantial. (See
table 3)
Table 3: Average Daily Wage of Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza Strip
Compared to Israeli Wages (in Israeli Pounds)
Palestinian Israeli
GA
GA

Palestinian Israeli Palestinian Israeli

AG
AG
IN
IN

Palestinian
CO

Israeli
CO

1972

17.2

34.4

15.4

22.2

15.6

33.1

19.1

31.1

1973

22.9

42.8

20.6

25.7

21.6

40.7

25.1

38.1

Source: Jamil Hilal, Les Palestiniens de Cisjordanie et de Gaza, Khamsin no 2, 1975, p. 51. Israelis: Jews and
Arabs combined. GA = general average / AG = agriculture / IN = industry / CO = construction

This discrimination is compounded by the open theft practised by the Israeli state. The
Palestinian worker has practically 40 % deducted from his wages in the form of various
taxes, a rate much higher than the deductions made from the wages of the Israeli worker,
who in addition is eligible for certain benefits, such as social security, unemployment
insurance, paid vacations, retirement pension, etc., whereas the Palestinian worker in the
occupied territories is not. These taxes are a veritable tribute that the worker is obliged to
pay to the state while he works in conditions of total insecurity.
The Arab nationalist newspapers may often fill their columns with disapproving remarks
about Israel: They are stealing our workers. The Palestinians workers endure the double
oppression and the double exploitation existing in Israel for the simple reason that the
wages paid by the Arab bosses are even more miserable than those paid by their Zionist
masters. It is all but impossible for a Palestinian bourgeoisie, lacking any backbone and
mettle, to compete with Zionist capital. In the best of times it acts as the latter's lieutenant,
grumbling all the while. Consequently the Israeli bourgeoisie, attracted by the cheap
labour power on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, often concludes agreements for
subcontracted labour. Both bourgeoisies rake off the fat. The Israeli bourgeoisie profits
from the low wages that the Arab employers succeed in imposing on the workers, and it
can defuse the lame fits of opposition by the Palestinian bourgeoisie, which flourishes
on the steady business.
At the time of the war in 1948 the Palestinian struggle had not yet recovered from the
shock suffered in the defeat of the revolts of 1933 to 1936, and therefore the resistance was
rather weak. The unleashing of the six days war by Israel as well as the anger provoked by
the cowardice of the Arab governments led to massive revolts and the arming of the
Palestinian population. And it was precisely the al Fatah which assumed the task of
fettering this movement in a programme that preserved the existing Arab states. The wave
was sufficiently strong to permit a certain radicalisation, which led to the formation of
organisations that employed a more proletarian vocabulary and to a fusion of the
interests of the Palestinian-Jordanian masses on the one hand and the Palestinian-Lebanese
masses on the other hand.
The intent of this article is not to sketch a history of this revolutionary wave, unfortunately
deprived once again of the support of the proletariat in the large imperialist centres,
openly combated by all the Arab states, delivered to its executioners by the very
orientation and principles of the various parties in its leadership, which along with the
Arab states finally prostrated themselves before the international and local established
order. The important thing to understand is that the next revolutionary explosions will
come forth in social - and political, too, we hope - conditions vastly different from those of
1948, and even those of 1967.

Capitalism Creates Its Own Gravediggers

The net social result of the bloody primitive accumulation of capital in Palestine is
approximately as follows. The Palestinian refugee population which is not subject to
Israeli rule amounts to over 2.3 million persons (60 % of all Palestinians). It is naturally
without any ties to the land. Of this mass of refugees only 40 % of those of working age
have jobs, and the large majority of those employed are wage labourers (in 1970, 73.2 % of
Palestinians working in Lebanon, 79.3 % in Syria, 89.6 % in Kuwait), a significant portion
of them blue-collar workers. Thus the population is largely proletarianized. [16]
Among the million and a half Palestinians (that is, 40 % of all Palestinians) living under the
Zionist heel, only a minority still possesses land. The number of employers and selfemployed workers in the agricultural sector fell from 37,000 in 1969 to 26,100 in 1973 on
the West Bank and from 6,200 in 1970 to 4,600 in 1973 on the Gaza Strip. The figures have
fallen even further in recent years. [17] The expropriation process continues and
consequently may still provoke agrarian unrest and revolts, particularly in a period of
economic crisis, given that in the whole region the Arab working class population is not
significantly urbanised and still lives in villages transformed into dormitories. [18]
On the West Bank the workers formed 47.5 % of the active Palestinian population in 1973;
55.6 % on the Gaza Strip. In Israel the proportion is probably about the same since 72.6 %
of the Arabs are wage labourers. But all these Palestinian proletarians are more often
agricultural and construction workers than industrial workers.
In spite of the hypocritical excuses and fallacious justifications of the Israeli and European
and American imperialist bourgeoisies, it is not difficult to imagine the degree of
oppression suffered by the half million Palestinians dwelling in a state where there is
already social discrimination between Jews of occidental and oriental origin, where
nationality is based on Jewish nationality, itself based on religion, a state which is moreover
permanently at war with the neighbouring Arab states. But these Palestinians whom the
state differentiates further according to religion into Christians, Druses, or Muslims, are at
least theoretically entitled to the same economic and social rights as the Jews of Israel. As for
the Palestinians on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, their plight is even more frightful
since they are openly in a state of siege. [19]
The broad Palestinian masses, thanks to whose labour the orchards of Israel blossom today
and to a growing extent the factories of Tel Aviv and Nablus hum, cannot continue to live
and defend themselves without fighting capitalism, on the terrain shaped by capitalism itself.
Their struggle immediately comes up against the political and racial discrimination
connected with Jewish privilege, in short against the colonial nature of the state of Israel,
which more and more uses against the workers' struggles the very laws it utilised
yesterday and continues to utilise today in the occupied territories to transform the
peasants into proletarians. For the modern proletarians, these discriminations and this
servitude based on race and religion are even more intolerable than in any other society,
and they amplify the immense potential of social revolt fed by capitalist exploitation and
the political oppression that flows from it.
In the ground below the slave democracy of Israel there are already accumulating the
white-hot substances of an eruption much more violent than those caused up to now by

the powerful shocks of expropriation of the Palestinian peasants. These are the substances
of proletarian class struggle which the emigrated Palestinian workers will help extend
through the whole region and which, in conjunction with the working class of the large
imperialist centres, will succeed in breaking the social front of Jewish solidarity in Israel,
drawing the Jewish proletarians into its impetuous course and taking the lead of the poor
peasant masses in revolt. And this struggle is a fight to the death against the local and
international established order, which can only be broken definitively by the victory of the
world communist revolution.
Communist Program, no.7, 1981, p. 19-32

Notes:
1. Marx, Capital Vol. I, ch. XXVI, The Secret of Primitive Accumulation, Moscow,
1954, p. 668.
2. Marx, Capital Vol. I, ch. XXVI, The Secret of Primitive Accumulation, Moscow,
1954, p. 669.
3. See particularly Lorand Gaspard, Histoire de la Palestine, Paris, 1978, p. 140.
4. See Nathan Weinstock, Le Sionisme contre Isral, Paris, 1969, pp. 179-80.
5. Robert Somers, Letters from the Highlands or The Famine of 1847, London, 1848,
quoted in Marx, Capital Vol. I, ch. XXVI, The Secret of Primitive Accumulation,
Moscow, 1954, p. 684.
6. Nathan Weinstock, Le Sionisme contre Isral, Paris, 1969, p. 392.
7. Sefer Ha-Khukkim (Principal Laws) 37, 1950, p. 86.
8. For a complete picture of this legislation we refer the reader to the following works:
Nathan Weinstock, Le Sionisme contre Isral, Paris, 1969, pp. 374-399; Lorand
Gaspard, Histoire de la Palestine, Paris, 1978, pp. 187-189; and Sabri Jiryis, The
Arabs in Israel, N.Y., 1976, pp. 89-102. See also Problmes onomiques et
sociaux, no. 199, Paris, Nov. 2, 1973.
9. Of the 475 Arab villages that existed in Israeli-occupied Palestine in 1948, today
only 90 remain. The other 385 have been wiped off the map by dynamite and
bulldozers.
10. See the articles by Lazare Rozensztroch and Jacqueline Farhoud Iraissaty in the
review Khamsin, no. 2, 1975.
11. On October 29, 1956, Israeli soldiers entered the village of Kfar Kassem to decree a
curfew. They announced to the villagers that anyone still found outside his house in
a half-hour would be executed. Several villagers still working in the fields and on
Israeli jobs outside the village at that hour could not be warned, when they
returned the Israeli soldiers stopped them, lined them up and shot them: fortyseven villagers were assassinated. The state of Israel opened an inquiry and passed
sentence on those responsible. In 1960 the second ranking officer found responsible
for the massacre was placed in charge of Arab affairs in the region of Ramleh, not
far from Kfar Kassem.

12. This is how Problmes onomiques et sociaux, no. 199, Paris, Nov. 2, 1973,
summarises the meaning of commentaries by Sabri Jiryis in his book on the subject.
13. Orders of forced residence, of house arrest, of expulsion or detention by decree are
given by the dozen, but these measures affect only Arabs (...) The same
discrimination is to be found in the attitude of the authorities with respect to the
freedom of the press and freedom of association. Until now no Hebrew newspaper
has been suspended and no Jewish political association has been prohibited, no
matter how extremist they may be and no matter how distant they may be from the
attitude of the regime. On the other hand, no Arab journal can be published in
Israel unless the authorities can count on the support or at least the complicity of
those responsible for it. No Arab organisation has been authorised to participate in
any activity without the consent and total approval of the authorities. Sabri Jiryis,
Democratic Freedoms in Israel,Problmes onomiques et sociaux, no. 199,
Paris, Nov. 1973. This passage illustrates the oppression suffered by the
Palestinians, but it is certain that the same laws will be applied with the same
severity to any Jews who go so far as to break the social front of Jewish solidarity on
which the hypocrisy of Israeli democracy rests.
14. Lorand Gaspard, Histoire de la Palestine, Paris, 1978, p. 145.
15. The last colony was established in June 1979, not without resistance. According to
Le Monde of June 8, 1979, the settlement called Eilon Moreh was officially founded
on June 7. This new colony is situated on top of a hill south of the town of Nablus,
and covers 198 acres of land, property of the Arab residents of the sector who were
expropriated by the Israeli government following a decision of the supreme court
justifying the act for defence reasons. The bulldozers began to open up access
roads. The few dozen future inhabitants, of the village arrived on board army
vehicles. On Sunday June 17, a major demonstration against the establishment of
this colony took place at Nablus, provoking the intervention of the Israeli army
which was greeted by a shower of stones.
16. See Jacqueline Farhoud Iraissaty in the review Khamsin, no. 2, 1975.
17. See Jamil Halil, Les Palestiniens de Cisjordanie et de Gaza, in Khamsin, no. 2,
197S, pp. 46-68.
18. In its number of May 29, 1979, the daily Asharq Al-Awsat appearing in London,
reported that the inhabitants of a Jewish colony in the Sinai called Ofera, after
having been dislodged from the Sinai by virtue of the Israeli-Egyptian treaty, tried
to occupy the Arab village called Maalia in Galilee. The colonists appeared at the
village with their furniture, their tools and their tractors and their banners read
Galilee in exchange for the Sinai and Ofera promises not to let a single Arab live
in Israel. The Palestinian population tried to hold discussions but the colonists
replied by showing that they had been officially mandated by the Jewish Agency to
take over the village. A lively argument ensued; one colonist shot several times over
the heads of the Arab delegates in order to intimidate the villagers. Immediately
dozens of inhabitants of the village ran up. The ensuing brawl lasted more than 2
hours and afterwards the colonists were forced to pick up their belongings and take
flight, leaving their huts in flames. When the police arrived they asked: Did al

Fatah give you the order to shoot at the Jews? The villagers answered the police
interrogation with a general strike. The government, surprised at encountering
spontaneous resistance, retreated and declared over the airwaves that the state had
not been implicated in the operation, responsibility resting with the colonists alone,
and that it had not even been informed of their intentions! Once again, force must
be opposed by force alone.
19. If an illustration of this fact is necessary, Le Monde of June 6, 1979 reports that on
Monday June 4, in the middle of the night the houses in which four Palestinian
lived who were suspected of belonging to the resistance were encircled by the
army; the families received the order to leave the premises immediately. The
furniture was taken to the garden of El Jenieh, the house of the parents of Mell Ataf
Yussef was razed by a bulldozer, At Ramalleh and El Birch, three apartments were
walled in after their occupants had been evacuated. The doors and windows were
blocked by a partition of bricks and cement, The entire arsenal of terrorist laws is
thus quite alive and in particular the laws on collective responsibility.